Step 8 and the People He Was Told to Leave Alone – Jim P.

Wow. I'm an alcoholic. My name is Jim Powers. My sobriety date is February 18, 2002. And the world famous Central Orlando Group in Orlando, Florida is my home group. And it is an honor to be here tonight. When Mac asked me, and I called my sponsor down in Florida, he said there's no coincidence. You know there's about 75,000 people in Akron, Ohio celebrating Founders Day this weekend. And I went, how about that? Monday will be 78 years of Alcoholics Anonymous program. And this is the only program I know of that they have not changed one word in the basic text of Alcoholic Anonymous in 78 years. Millions of people have gotten sober, including myself, following the clear-cut directions and the specific instructions outlined in the big book of Alcoholix Anonymous. And like I said, it's an honor to be here. It's an honored to be anywhere. through God's grace that I'm sober and his mercy that I am alive because I really don't think that I deserved either one of them and I will tell you a little bit about what I was like what happened and what I am like now I was born the fifth of six children to an Air Force hero my father was a commander of Air Force bases first B-17 over Berlin and all kinds of things but he was not an alcoholic my mother was not an alcoholic. My older sisters were not alcoholic, and I didn't believe I was an alcoholic when I got here. I really didn't. I did not have what I considered the alcoholic look. I didn not own a trench coat. That's the only thing I knew. We traveled all over the world. Every couple of years we were moving to a new base. My dad was in demand everywhere we went. And my family never talked about alcoholism at all. Both my grandfathers died of alcoholism. Both my mom and my dad's fathers were raging alcoholics. They had jobs, but they died of this disease. And so it was just we don't talk about the dead in our family. And I told a story at one of the meetings here. One of the first meetings I came here, there was a little mouse that ran across the floor. And three or four of the women kind of jumped up and they wanted to jump up into the chairs and the men were already up in the chairs so they didn't get the room. And I kind of laughed because when I was 10 years old, we were at McCourt Air Force Base in Tacoma, Washington, and three of us were coming home from elementary school. We cut through some woods and we caught a little field mouse. We were playing with it and one of the kids got bit and he put it in his little lunch pail and took it home. and this kind of shows you what was going to happen in my life. It was already happening at that time, I was already a liar quite a bit but he went home, his mom saw that he got bit by this mouse she called my mom, my mom asked me if I got bit and I thought to myself, I won't have to go to school. Yes, yes I did. And then she started screaming and I'm like never mind, no I didn't no, no, look, no bites. It was too late, I had told the lie and so I proceeded to get rabies shots and that's what you get when you're 10 years old and you're lying about getting bit by a mouse I got 11 out of the 14 because they had to cut the head off and send it from Washington State to Washington D.C. it wasn't quite organized like it is now or you can find out in about 5 minutes so that was something that should have given my parents a heads up that I was already restless, irritable, discontent I was lying, I was stealing already at 10 the next year we moved to Duluth, Minnesota in Duluth which is the coldest place in the continental United States I believe it was cold there my older sister got married and the colonel said that everybody can have a sip of champagne to toast her and I was 11 years old so we toasted her and my brothers and sisters sipped theirs I threw mine back and I don't know what happened there are some speakers who talk about the golden moment all I knew is it created something in me that it doesn't do in normal human beings it created the mores as I call them I wanted more and I went back by that fountain and I got more and I was spinning around they put me to bed I threw up and peed on myself and the next morning when I came to I had an anvil and a sledgehammer in my head with the worst headache ever and all I could think about is how can I do this again Normal people don't do that. When the big book talks about I'm an abnormal drinker, it pegged me pretty good. We moved to Orlando in 1966. I was 13 years old and I proceeded to find people that were about five years older than me, guys that liked to drink like me, guys that didn't like school like me. I did not like school. My older brothers and sisters loved school. I did Not. And so I started not going to school. And I started joining a burglary ring around central Florida in the late 60s and early 70s. And all we were doing was breaking into houses so we could get to booze, so we Could Get Drunk. And I got arrested many times. I spent a lot of my youth in juvenile detention facilities where I was locked up and then they took me to school and then I was locked up. I don't know why that happened. It continued for a number of years I would get out I would swear I didn't want to go back And go back to juvenile home I would start drinking I would break into houses I would be caught It was a vicious cycle for me And then when I turned 16 I stopped being in the juvenile home And started being in jails Why nobody ever thought That maybe he ought to go to treatment Or maybe there weren't treatment centers In the early 70s I'm sure there were, but they just didn't think of it. I was a bad child, and that's what I was labeled. I was labelled a criminal and a badchild, and society has places for you. That's called jail. And so I started going in and out of jails and county jails and city jails. When I was late in my 16th birthday, I picked up a gun, and I started doing armed robberies. I never killed anybody. I never shot anybody. but I stuck the gun in a lot of people's faces and I started getting arrested for armed robbery when I was 17 they arrested me for about 13 felony charges and I was going away to prison I knew it and I wrote a letter to my dad he had bailed me out so many times and we loved each other and I loved to be with my dad when he was home but he was always away he was TV wise somewhere and that's when I would go wild when he would be hunting and fishing and catching worms and i was okay i didn't go to school when he was home you know but when he was gone i was a wild child and uh i wrote him a letter and it every word of it was true you know but it's it's called the alcoholic prayer you know please get me out of this i'll never do it again please get me out of this i'll never do it again and after three months of waiting for trial he went ahead and bailed me out And I meant, I'll never do it again until they went to bed. And when him and my mom went to bedtime that night, I broke into his gun cabinet, I stole his .45 automatic he carried through three wars, and I took off to California. And I was interstate flight to avoid prosecution, carrying a gun across the southern United States, robbing my way to California." This is Alcoholics Anonymous. I am a very strong believer in the Big Book and the Twelve Traditions. Part of my story involves drugs. I'm going to keep it to a minimum, but this is the late 60s, early 70s, and you all know that there was just everything. And I did every one of them, but I quit before they came up with this thing called crack. But when I got to California, I was turning orange. I was bloating up, and I had hepatitis C. I had serum hepatitis from a dirty needle, and my friends dropped me off at a military hospital. And since I had a military ID, and in California, they weren't really in touch with Orlando because in Orlando at the Navy base there, my picture was on a wanted poster at the PX, but they didn't know that in California. And so I was treated for hepatitis C in California I got out after about six weeks. I almost died. And then I took off from California to Minnesota doing the same thing. I went from Minnesota I started coming back to Florida a friend of mine was going to have a party I snuck into Florida I went to the party the police knew I was going they showed up with a SWAT team I had a pistol in my hand and there was a standoff and the standoff was me pointing my gun at a police officer who knew me and him pointing his gun at me telling me to drop mine and to this day I still don't know he retired as the chief of police of the Maitland Police Department and I met him after he retired and he remembered me. And he said he didn't know why he didn'T shoot me either. But eventually, I dropped my gun. I had hepatitis again. They took me to an isolation cell and a couple weeks later they took me before a judge and I was sentenced to 52 years in Rafer State Prison. And I'm 18 years old. I know what fear is. I know What Fear Is. I was not raised in a religious family. We didn't have a lot of church. Maybe a couple times a year we'd dress up the colonel's kids and go to church on Christmas or Easter but didn't have a lot of God in my life didn't know about God but I can tell you the only book in that isolation cell was the Bible and I grabbed a hold of that and I just begged God please don't let this happen and a couple weeks later the judge brought me back in and he said you might have some redeeming qualities I'm going to sentence you to 18 months on a chain gang and so at 18 years old coming out of isolation for hepatitis C I was stuck on a chaîne gang and if you've all seen the movie Cool Hand Luke That's exactly what a chain gang is. I served on the road as best I could for a while, but in the back of my mind, the only thing I wanted to do was be a trustee. I didn't care whether you liked me or not. I wanted it to be a trusted so I could get off the truck so I can get in the building because when you're feeding 150 people three meals a day, I was born in Georgia and I'm not stupid. I know how to make alcohol and you have all the ingredients in that kitchen if you put them together in a can and you let it ferment for a couple of weeks. You strain it through a sock. You can hold your nose, swallow it, and you can get hammered. It's called buck in prison. And when I got here and I read Dr. Silkworth's opinion that men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol, I was hooked. I was hook right there. There was no way around it. I never drank for taste. I never sipped a drink. I never drink for taste I drank full-blown alcoholic ever since the first drink. I got married in Mississippi in 1978 in a drunken haze. I thought I was in love. They call it lust. And we stayed married for 21 years. I came back to Florida. My dad and I reconciled. I got into the real estate business with my dad. Somehow or another, all those felonies went away. and this is part of my story how many times looking behind me do I see God working in my life before I ever acknowledged that there was a God so I got into real estate I made really good money and my dad told me two things don't drink during the day and don't drank with your clients and I said okay and so I didn't drink during the night and I didn' drink with my clients but every night when I got off work and I was going home And I had a four or five pack of Schlitzmalt liquor to get me home. And once I got home, I opened a bottle of booze and then I went to the blackout. And I did a lot of things in a blackout, I drove a lot times in blackouts. And to the best of my knowledge, I never killed anybody or I never caused any accidents, even though I don't know that for a fact. My wife and I had trouble holding on to babies. and so we were married 17 years she had lost 3 children and finally at 17 she was able to carry a baby to 8 months and we had a premature boy and we couldn't agree on a name my last name is Powers and she wanted to name him Austin I wanted to named him Seamus and we went and saw the movie Forrest Gump and we both said yeah that's a good name so we named him Forrest you have to see the movie 2 or 3 times to realize who Forrest is named after My great-great-grandfather was a Ku Klux Klan leader, and my son's living back in Columbus, Mississippi right now. He still loves me, I promise you. He's almost 19 years old and tells me he loves me all the time. When he was five years old, my body started breaking down. My drinking, and I had some back pains, and so I was taking some things from my back and drinking. And one night, my bladder told me to wake up, and then my brain was passed out. and when I came to, this woman was standing over screaming at me that I had peed all over her and she'd had enough and I said, that's never going to happen again and it happened the next night and I swore it would never happen again and I bought a new bed and it didn't happen the next day and I couldn't control it my bladder, my kidneys, my liver they were all shutting down and I didn't think I had a problem we agreed to go ahead and get a divorce and it was going to be an amenable divorce. We weren't going to be nasty to each other and the next day I stopped by my dad who I was running the real estate company for and there was he and my stepmother there and my stepsmother had worked for the Hillsborough County Court System that's where Tampa is for 30 years but I never asked her what she did. She was the lady that DUI drivers went to to find out how many meetings at AA they had to have their paper signed and I've signed thousands of those now But, you know, at the time, I didn't even know about Alcoholics Anonymous. No clue. Thought it was a bunch of old men coming out from underneath the bridge, smelling, you now, bad and everything else. I had no clue. She said, I need to go to AA and my wife needs to go Al-Anon. My wife said,I don't have a problem. I said,i'm not an alcoholic. I've got a house on the lake with a guest house, two cars. I'm making good money. How dare you? You know? And went home and got drunk. You know. I had not drank for 30 years. I didn't go a day, I didn' t go a week to try to see if I could stop drinking. I didn''t have a problem. You know, my wife had a problem so what happened was a couple of events happened right in a row. Number one, a good friend of mine who was a couple years younger than me was tough loved out of his house. They told him don' t come home if you' re drunk and he got really drunk and he parked his car on a dirt road right down the street from his house and he set it on fire and committed suicide. And that affected me. Right at that time, my life was just spinning out of control. My wife was going to leave me, take my son, move to Jacksonville, I thought. I didn't know she was having an affair online with a guy back where she was raised in Columbus, Mississippi, but that would be either here or there. What was happening was I was not paying attention because I was drunk all the time. I went to the guy's funeral, and I believe the hand of God touched me there because the next day I walked into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, the Central Orlando group is right on a major boulevard in Orlando, kitty-cornered to my real estate office. I would drive by there every morning and see these people standing outside saying, what a unique place to put a labor pool. Everybody's outside smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and they're sober. And I'm hungover going into work, and then when I called a friend and I said, look, I've got to go to a meeting. I'm only going to go to one just so I can say I went to one. He goes, Jim, they're waiting for you across the street. And I go, at the labor pool? And he goes, not a labor pool. So I walked over there. I sat down right by the door. They started the noon meeting. I didn't hear much of anything but the chairperson probably knew I had something to say so he called on me and I broke out in tears and I said, I can't stop drinking. I don't know what to do. And a little girl named Julie was sitting next to me. She's one of my best friends now. And she patted me on the shoulder and said, it's going to be all right. And I left that meeting and I had no intention of going back. And a guy kind of stalked me down the street to the stoplight. He was talking 90 miles an hour AA lingo. You know, you got a chance. You could just come back. Just come back tomorrow. Try not to drink today. And I'm like, get away from me. I came to a meeting. Okay. I didn't see any trench coats But I came to a meeting, and I wasn't going back. And the next day at 1145, I got up out of my office. I walked across the street, and went to another AA meeting. And it came to me, and broke down, and cried. And I said, I can't quit drinking. Now, I'm sure people were saying, get a sponsor, work the steps, pray to God, those things. I'm certain they were saying that. I wasn' t hearing it. Because I looked up there at the board, and said, I might be having a problem with alcohol. I'm running a pretty good life and step two kept me going in and out of AA for three and a half years because I wasn't crazy and that's all I read is I'm crazy and I'm not crazy you know I just have a little trouble with alcohol I went to that meeting for 27 days in a row and every day I broke out in tears and every night I left there swearing I wasn t going to drink and every time by 6 o'clock I was drunk on the 27th day an old man named Leo He was a survivor of the Holocaust. He had been imprisoned in Auschwitz for five years, cleaning the gas chambers. And he had something like 30 years at the time. I didn't know. He just seemed like a gruff old man. He said, why don't you go home and drink a bottle of arsenic? I'm tired of seeing you try to kill yourself slowly. And I got so mad and so resentful at that old man that that night, it was a Friday night, I went home and I didnít take a drug and I did not drink for the first time in almost 30-something years. and I started my sobriety on a resentment. And if you know anything about Alcoholics Anonymous and you start your sobriery on a resentments, you're not going to stay sober. And I didn't. Like I said, I went in and out for three and a half years. I would get 90 days. I would gets six months. I was praying but I wasn't honest. Somebody would say, You got a sponsor? Yes, I do. But he doesn't want me to tell you who he is. his name was jim i was sponsoring myself and we had a great time with the steps we're not going to do that one we don't need to tell anybody about that and i would drink and it got so bad that i didn't know what was going to happen all i knew is it was progressive i was getting worse and worse and worse my wife had left she'd taken my child i'd signed some divorce papers i don't remember signing because I was drunk and I've never missed a child support payment in almost 17 years right now. I don't care. I gave my word. I'm keeping my word and that was because of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. That's what I was taught here. I got nine months of sobriety, praying every morning and every night, not drinking, going to meetings. I wouldn't work in the steps. Step two kept popping up and even though I heard And the explanation of step two, I kept saying I'm not crazy. I'm Not Drinking. So everything's fine. Everything's fine in my life. I'm doing great. I'm feeling better. I'm Doing Good at Work. People still ask me if I've got a sponsor. I'm still lying. They ask me what step I'm on. I'm like four. It's a tough one. It might take me five or six years to get through that one. And a guy called me and said, why don't we go to a speaker meeting at Central Saturday night? And I said, sure. So we went to the speaker meeting. This guy's up there telling his story. And I'm sitting there in the room like that bobble-headed doll on the back of the car just bouncing my head everything the guy's saying I am identifying with, including he drank schlitzwalt liquor. And I didn't know that many people who drank that. so after the meeting my friend said why don't you go up and shake his hand and thank him we have about 150 people for a speaker meeting down at Central he had a crowd around him and I said that's ok he goes no no just go shake his hands and I went up and shook this guy's hand and I told him you really told my story and while I'm shaking his hand my friend goes Joe this guy needs a sponsor and he looked at me and I looked at him and I said well you know I probably do and he says are you done drinking and I say yeah you saw me I just picked up a nine month chip and he said that doesn't matter are you down drinking and I'm pretty sure I'm done drinking and this is where God really started coming into my life and I see it every day now I took out my business card on the back side on the white side I wrote down my phone number I handed it to Joe and I asked call me Monday if you want to sponsor me margaret got it uh joe took out his business card on the white side on the back he wrote down his phone number and he said call me monday if you want me to sponsor you which is how it's done we turned those two business cards over we worked for the same real estate company in two different divisions i had never met the man he worked 20 miles away at a different office and I had never met him and I knew right then something was happening there were too many coincidences happening in my life at that time and this one just really assured me this was it you know and so the next morning I got up I went to our 10 o'clock meeting in the morning and for no reason whatsoever I thought to myself I can have a drink I can do this I can't have one drink one drink and I stopped at a liquor store and I bought a half gallon of whiskey and I went home and I remember that night I poured one drink and the next morning when I came to on my kitchen floor I was covered with vomit, pee and blood and I didn't know what I had done I didn' t know where I had gone or who I had hurt and I drank half that half gallon and I was just panicked and Margaret touched on it the other night I picked up the phone and I called Joe. And he heard what we have to hear, I think. He heard my desperation. You know? He heard me screaming out, I can't do this, Joe. I need help. And so he said, pour out the rest of your whiskey, go to your noon meeting, pick up a white chip, I'll meet you afterwards and we'll start working these steps. It was February 18, 2002. My life has changed so much. I believe that this is a textbook, just like it says, the basic text of Alcoholics Anonymous. I believe every word that's in this book, especially the first 164 pages, because all of it relates to me. I studied this book and I refer back to it because that's what a textbook is. When I was on the chain gang, I don't ever remember them bringing in AA meetings, but they brought in a school teacher. And I got a GED at night on the chain gang. And I carry it around in my big book because on it, it says 70 or below is failing. None of my grades are above 65. So I have no clue how I have a legal GED in the state of Florida other than God. It was working in my life way, way before I ever knew it. I worked the steps to the best of my ability. and I stayed sober. And one of his requirements is that when we get to the 12th step, you've got to reach out your hand and you start working with other people. And I see a lot of people coming into AA getting sober, working the steps, getting their life back, start not going to meetings, start slacking off calling their sponsor and the next thing you know, they're either drunk, dead or in jail. And I've seen it way too many times but it's the way life is. it's them not me I don't want to do that I don' t want to wind up being one of those people that has to take another drink the book tells me specifically what's going to happen to me if I drink it doesn't tell me when it just tells me I'm going to die and I have no interest in killing myself today I didn't know I was doing that for all those years but once I came here and once I put down the drink and worked the steps then I realized that's exactly what I was done all those year I was killing myself You know, the first step talks about being powerless over alcohol and my life's unmanageable. I thought that it meant my life was unmanagable when I was drinking. And I was taught that no, your life's in manageable by you period. You need a new manager. By this time I knew that I was crazy and so I had no problem with step two. I had not problem believing that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity because It was the insanity preceding the first drink that I was so crazy about. You know, I couldn't stay sober because I was different is what I kept telling people. And I wasn't different. I was the same. I was somebody who had lost their ability to control the drinking a long time ago. Step three was not hard for me. I was taught that turning my will and my life is my thoughts and my actions. and I turn those over to God each day and I try to keep my hands off of them because God runs my life so well without my help my God is personal I don't share my God especially in Alcoholics Anonymous it's the God that I found when I got to the chapter that said deep down in every man woman and child is a fundamental belief in a power greater than themselves and I knew what they were meaning People look for God all over. They're not in a building. God's in my heart. Step four, I wasn't really thrilled about doing that because what I was told is I had to go back over my whole life, not just my drinking life, which means I had TO go back and write down all kinds of things about my fears, my resentments, the harms I had done to people, my sexual conduct, but I didn't want to drink. and it says at the end of step four that if my conduct continues to harm other people, I'm sure to drink again. This is not a theory. It's based on their experience of those first hundred people. And so I wrote it all down. In step five, it has another one of those little, I call them promises. People call them threats. It says, you know, unless we tell somebody our whole life story, we might not get over the drink. And so, I sat there, and I had some secrets that I wasn't going to tell my sponsor. I just, I wasn't going to do it. And we sat down together to do the fifth step. He started off by telling me a lot of stuff about his fifth step and then he looked right at me and he said, now tell me the stuff you weren't goingto tell me. The guy was good. And so I blurted out exactly what I wasn' t going to tell him and the rest of it was not that hard. Step six and seven, two smallest steps in the big book. 13 lines of both prayers become entirely ready to have God take that trash away from me each and every day and seven say the prayer God take these defects between me and usefulness short version of it step eight to me was taking a little bit of step four but then to write down those people I had harmed and one of the biggest words that kept coming up to me was be willing to make amends to them all willingness in this program is probably it says willingness, open mindedness honesty and the spiritual appendix but I think willingness has got to be the key and so I wrote down those people and thank God for a sponsor because if I hadn't had a sponsor and I had wrote them down and then done the nice step I would have forgot that part and said I wouldn't harm others because there were people on that list and my sponsor said, you need to just leave those people alone. The best thing you can ever do to make amends to them is never contact them again in your life. And I'm glad he said that because I have friends right now that probably would have killed me if I told them things that I had done and I don't need to do that. I need to leave them alone. Step 10 happened to me on Monday. It happens to me every night. I continue to take personal inventory and when I'm wrong I promptly admit it I wish I had the person's phone number when I left here Monday night I opened my mouth and actually said something and the minute I said it I said that was stupid and she said there's no doubt that was super and I left her and on the way home I'm thinking that was really arrogant and stupid and you were just trying to be funny you know I try to be funny sometimes and sometimes something comes out of my mouth it's so stupid I was so bothered Monday night all day Tuesday Tuesday night when I came back up here on Wednesday the first person I went to is that person and I said listen I need to make amends that really came out wrong I did not mean it that way and whether you were offended or not I have a conscience now that bothers me when I do and say something wrong and so I need to let you know that I didn't mean it the way it sounded and she was pissed so I'm glad I came and I did that but you know it was just it was it was me nobody else has to tell me to do these things now God tells me to do the right thing to do with these things because he's in my life on a daily basis he's all around me all the time I see God shots every day in my live 11 I continue to try you know I try to do my best to improve my conscious conduct with God as I understand him and I don't understand God I never will but I know he's there and I know he's here and I know he loves alcoholics because I believe this program was divinely inspired. When Bill met Bob you know to me that was God intervening in both of their lives. And then when they wrote this book I believe God was really moving Bill's hands and everybody else's hands that had something to do with this book. i got in a little debate and i don't debate very often but one of my sponsors called me today and he he said you know i don'T have time to go to meetings i've got a great job my girlfriend's doing this and blah blah blah and i said you KNOW six months ago you crawled into the doors and you were about to lose your job you were ABOUT TO LOSE YOUR KIDS and we worked these steps and the only thing I asked you to do was make sure you kept attending meetings and reach your hand out. And now you're telling me you're leaving a meeting five minutes early. And he had a retort planned because he knew I was going to say something like that. I've said it more than once. He said, well, my retort to that was I make as many meetings as Bill and Bob did in the beginning. They had more than a meeting a week. And I go, no idiot. how long was Bob sober before he went to the man on the bed in this big silence and he goes one day and I said go back and read the story again it's in Dr. Bob and the Good Old Timers he was sober eight days when they went to see Bill Dotson the man of the bed so tell me that you're sober you're working the program and you don't have time to go reach your hand out and carry the message I wouldn't be here today if people weren't carrying the message you know especially to the young people I love young people in Alcoholics Anonymous. They're our future. You know, I'd like to say I'm young in Alcoholic Anonymous and I'm younger at heart. But unfortunately, I'm premature gray at 35. I try to carry this message everywhere I go. And I try the same thing and I try practice these principles in all my fear. i really wasn't a very good person in the beginning i mean i struggled with a lot of these things when i really did say i need help but it became easier the more i studied the book um things started happening in my life that were just totally unbelievable in 2006 a man told me to bring my dreams to aa I said, bring your drunk dreams and give them to God and see what happens. One of my big dreams was to own like four or five acres in Randolph County, Georgia. I know. I'm a big deer hunter. And I couldn't find four or Five Acres, and I ran into a gentleman that had 46 acres for sale, and I couldn' t afford 46 acres. And I was living in my dad's house. He died when I was seven days sober. and my older brother and I lived upstairs, downstairs and we inherited the house. And so I told my older brother who didn't like to hunt, didn't like to fish, you know, I'd love to buy this property up in Georgia and he says, well let's go up there and look at it. In 2004 his only son had overdosed on heroin and died and my brother became a rock. He didn't want to be around people anymore. He wanted to isolate. I didn't know it but he loved that property and so we moved up into a barn and a camper on 46 six acres, and started building a couple of houses. I opened a real estate company the day before the market crashed. Some of my plans still don't go the way I want them to, but they go the ways God wants them to. In 2008, I was sitting in the property. I got a phone call from somebody I'd never met down in Orlando saying your little brother's in a coma. My little brother was 10 years younger than me. He just completed his fifth DUI. And he's on felony probation. and I said, okay, why are you calling me? He didn't want to talk to me again. I tough-loved him, you know. He was still getting a disbursement check but he didn't ever want to see me again She said because the last thing he said before he lapsed into the coma is don't call my brother Jim and I'm a friend of Bill W's and I've heard you speak. so i drove down to orlando they gave my brother six months to two years to live active alcoholism had created tumors all over his brain liver kidneys stomach and he had a bracelet on his ankle and it's not the gps bracelet it's something that i didn't even know about that monitored sweat glands and it would set off an alarm at his probation department he'd do five years in state prison if he ever drank so he hadn't had a drink in over a year and he wanted that bracelet off and so I went to the probation department with him after he had his 10 treatments of radiation because that's all they were going to do to shrink some tumors and I got the bracelet off and on the way back to his place I said you want to stop off at my central meeting and he said sure and he made it about half a meeting and he says I'm starving and I said alright let's go to lunch and we stopped at the one where he used to work and he ordered a glass of wine and I thought this is a bad, bad idea I said, you're going to die fast. And he goes, no, no. They gave me up to two years. Just let me get a couple weeks rest after this radiation and then we'll go do the bucket list. We made a bucket list where we were going to do everything. He was going to jump out of an airplane. I was not going to jumping out of a plane. I was going jump out from an airplane on sober. It does not sound like a good idea to me. But anyway, so I came back up to Georgia And he started drinking right where he left off, about a gallon and a half of wine every night. And in about 30 days I got a phone call from that same girl saying he's being rushed to the emergency room. About a half hour later I got another call from the doctor saying he's blown an ulcer, we have to go in and operate, and you're his health care surgeon. And I said, okay, go ahead and operate. Six o'clock that night I called. He was in a coma again with a tube in him, then a light in him. And they asked me to come down. As I was driving down, I kept getting calls from medical people saying, what else can we do? And I go, I don't know. Do what you can. But no earth-shattering, life-saving maneuvers because he said in his living will that he was going to die, so leave him alone. And I got down there at 11 o'clock at night and I sent everybody home because they'd been with him all day. And I was talking to my brother. He was gone. he was swole up cold as ice machine was breathing for him i was holding his hand and a nurse came in and i said you know i don't know why he's got this tube in here breathing for him and she said well he came up from surgery that way you'll have to wait and talk to the administrators tomorrow to get it removed and i say not if god's listening and about two o'clock in the morning he flatlined even though that machine was I'm still pumping air into him, and he died. And I was holding his hand. 44 years old. That really affected me. I really stayed back down in Orlando. I didn't feel like I could come back up to Georgia right then. I went back to real estate. I went Back to really involved in Alcoholics Anonymous. Some great things were happening. Some bad things were happening. Troubles of my own making. It tells me on page 62. Selfish self-centeredness. not alcohol but selfish and self-centeredness is my problem the root of my problem and all my troubles are of my own making no matter who I want to blame they're my fault I have to look at me nobody else and so last year I was going into real close to getting into bankruptcy and I decided that I needed to get into a job because real estate wasn't getting it I saw an advertisement for over the road trucking and so I I went to school to become a Class A over-the-road truck driver, and the Moors still have me. And I said, what's the top thing you can have? And they said, hazmat tanker. So I took that, and I have that. And I jumped into a truck, and I started driving across the country, and it is the most stressful job I've ever had in my life. I thought it would be a great job for my son to have when he got out of high school, and I am so wrong, you do not have a life. It was team driving over mountains. I trained in Orange Groves in Florida, and the first place I started out from was Chattanooga, Tennessee. And the guy decided, okay, you've been to school, you start driving the truck. It's April 1st. I'm coming into Albuquerque, New Mexico in a snowstorm. This is not a fun job. And I'm on day one. On day seven, I'm passing kidney stones. I last two weeks with that company because I wanted to kill that guy. I came back down to Randolph County. A friend of mine over in Randolph County works for BWI and said I could probably get a job so I went over and talked to Benny Whitehead and I got a job with him. And we were off to California which is nothing but driving over mountains. Every state except Florida has got mountains in it. And I'm still learning how to shift. And this guy wants me to drive the night shift so I can't see where the mountains are all of a sudden I'm on the mountains. After I pass my sixth kidney stone in the back of a big truck, I can't do it anymore. The pain has gotten to be too much. I'm destroying myself. I have to leave Benny Whitehead. I drive back to Orlando. I go to my doctor and he said, You're not a truck driver. Your kidneys will not take nonstop movement because as a tandem driver, the truck never stops. You're just always in vibration. And I said, Great. Why didn't they put that on the brochure? You know, come be a truck driver. Get kidney stones. But God was doing it for me because at that exact time, if Ken you're sober, that exact same time at that time a gentleman was starting a big book study group and only 12 of us were invited and the agreement was that when we went through it line by line, when we were done, each one of us would then start a big books study group and that's what I'm getting ready to do when I get back to Orlando. I already have the 11 other people that are going to go with me. It changed my life. It changed My life. Now, I'm 10 years sober. I'm not drinking. I'm studying the book every day. I read passages from the big book, different other material that I read, but mostly from the Big Book. But it changed My Life so dramatically that I now look back and know God was preparing Me for Me coming up here last November and finding my older brother had been dead for three days. And he died from untreated alcoholism, not active alcoholism. And that is something that will live with me forever. I couldn't do anything about it. He did not want to seek medical help. I knew there was problems, but I know so many people that stop drinking and they say, I'm fine, and they're not. They don't go to the doctor. They don'T go to The Dentist. And all of a sudden, all these problems pile up. And talking to his doctor after he was dead, I found out that he had horrendous health problems. And he didn't have anything in his bathroom cabinet except aspirin. I guess he wanted to die his way, which is his right. I want to die my way, which is God's way. I wantto die sober. I want a guy doing the right thing. There's nothing in this big book, Alcoholics Anonymous, just says that if I do the right thing today I got a guarantee wake up call tomorrow so every day when I wake up I thank God immediately for another day of sobriety and another day that I might be able to help somebody when the responsibility clause was passed in Toronto it was anybody, anywhere reaches out for help I want the hand of AA to be there and that's my hand I'm responsible and I am a responsible member of Alcoholics at Arms today the second to last talk I'm a big history buff. My sponsor is 28 years sober. He's got sober in Scotland, and they didn't use the big book in Scotland and they don't want you talking about God in Scotland. And so he sent away and started coming to America and he got Joe and Charlie tapes and he started making copies of the tapes. And this involved him making copies for his friends over in Scotland and then he moved to the United States and he's been hosting a website where he spends about 14 hours a day uploading and downloading speaker talks onto this website. you can't find it by googling it, you have to be invited to the website and we talked earlier today he has over 23,000 free speakers on that website he's got everyone that Bill, Bob all the first big book any of them that ever recorded a talk reel to reel whatever you can find and listen to for free and download copies of them conventions it doesn't matter this is his life because of what he went through to get sober. And so I listen to a lot of speaker tapes. I love a lot OF the people. I met a lot Of the good, what I call soldiers in AA. A lot OF them are in Akron this weekend sharing their experience. And the second to last talk that Bill Wilson gave, he said that the 12 steps and the program of Alcoholics Anonymous are not just to be worked. They're to be lived. They're To Be Lived In Your Home they're to be lived in your workplace they're not necessarily what I'm doing between the serenity prayer and the Lord's prayer it's what am I doing between the Lord'S prayer and the serentity prayer that really determines whether or not I'm during this program and today I'm trying to carry the message and I'll end with this at the end of the forward to the third edition which is the book I came in on And it says, every day, somewhere in the world, recovery begins when one alcoholic shares with another alcoholic their experience, strength, and hope. And I hope I did that tonight. Thank you.